Tag: gadget

I was recently asked what I thought about bridge cameras. To be honest I hadn’t really heard much about them before but when shown what they could do I was amazed.

A few days later I was packing my camera backpack for a day out down to Snowdrop Valley. Having not been there before I wasn’t sure about which lenses I might need so I took all three of the lenses I currently own, a wide-angle zoom, a prime lens and a telephoto zoom. (You can see more details of the lenses I use on the new Gadgets page I have set up listing all my gear)

I did in fact use all three lenses but they make the bag quite heavy and the constant switching of lenses is really starting to bug me. Sometimes I end up taking all three lenses and only using one of them…

As they were fresh in my mind this got me thinking about bridge cameras. Should I replace my dated DSLR with a bridge camera?

Amazon recently announced three new Kindle devices, the new Kindle, the Kindle Touch and the Kindle Fire. Then immediately afterwards it was suggested that they were unlikely to be made available in the UK before the end of the year…

I still have a fair few paper books so I wasn’t too put out by this delay. Then when the new, cheaper, Kindle was displayed on the Amazon site for £89 I couldn’t resist and decided to pre-order one. And as it arrived today I decided to get to work and write a review…

Once I had placed my pre-order I wanted to get my hands on an old Kindle, which has now been renamed the Kindle Keyboard, to make sure I would be able to make a decent comparison between the two so I recently read a short book on Shirley’s Kindle.

I received my new Kindle through the post today. That’s why this post is a little late. I wanted to make sure I had plenty of time to play with my new gadget so I can give a honest opinion of it…

I have been wanting to do a review of the Kindle for a while but haven’t really had a chance to get my hands on Shirley’s yet as I am still in the middle of a huge Stephen King book. An idea came to me and as the Kindle actually belongs to Shirley I decided to ask her to write a short review. So this is the first guest post on this site, written by my lovely wife.

I am currently in the process of joining the iOS Developer Program which will then allow me to release apps for iPhone to the Apple App Store.

You can download all of the stuff to start developing apps for free from Apple just by signing up as an Apple Developer. If you want to test them on your iPhone, iPad or iPod then you need to sign up to the developer program which costs $99/year (£59/year). This allows you to test your apps on your own hardware and then release them to the app store when you are happy.

I do not have a completed app yet as I am still working hard on learning the quirks of the language but it is going pretty well. It all seems to make sense so far so I have high hopes for creating something in the not too distant future.

You never know maybe I will reach the heights of apps like Angry Birds! This little game has become so popular they even have a range of Angry Birds Plush Toys.

This month I was redecorating my whole office. This took a lot longer than planned and the job isn’t completely done yet!

Add to that the fact that this is a short month and I was on holiday at the start of my working month so I also had some time to make up on the contracting side of my work. All in all this didn’t leave me with too much time on my hands to begin with…

When out and about and I come across an amazing site I can take a while deciding whether I should try and photograph the subject or get the video camera out instead. Hopefully the subject is still around when I have finally made my decision!

I like both mediums but for completely different reasons. I think video makes it much easier to capture an event, especially if it involves some kind of action. Sometimes though a great photo is worth hours of average video recordings…

Luckily I can make my decision before I venture out by only taking my DSLR or my video camera. But for how much longer is this going to be the case…

I recently bought myself a 2nd generation Apple TV for the front room. Now I have had it up and running for over a week I thought I should post a quick review of the device.

I have had a computer connected to my main TV for about 5 years now but it was slowly getting used less and less as the time it takes to power up was not very practical. I decided to look at what main uses I required and then set about finding a replacement with a quicker bootup process. As you can probably guess by now I ended up going with the Apple TV. I am not exactly an Apple fanboy but I do have an iPhone and love the simplicity of the interface so that helped make that choice.

So let’s get into what my requirements were and how the Apple TV stacks up…